Visitors hiking to Phantom Ranch must be self-sufficient and be prepared to carry or treat all drinking water. A break in the Trans-Canyon Water Pipeline and inclement weather delaying equipment from reaching repair crews, has resulted in a water shortage at Phantom Ranch at the bottom of Grand Canyon. https://www.nps.gov/grca/learn/news/20141211_pipeline-break-phantom.htm

Heavy rains caused major road damage in the Tuweep area of Grand Canyon National Park. https://www.nps.gov/grca/learn/news/storms-damage-tuweep-roads.htm

North Rim operations will begin seasonal shut-down of most visitor services on Friday, October 16. https://www.nps.gov/grca/learn/news/north-rim-seasonal-closure.htm

The National Park Service (NPS) announced today another opportunity for the public to weigh in on revisions to Grand Canyon National Park’s Backcountry Management Plan (BMP). The NPS began developing a Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) for this plan in 2011 in compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). https://www.nps.gov/grca/learn/news/backcountry-plan-webinar-and-open-house.htm

North Rim operations will begin seasonal shut-down of most visitor services on Saturday, October 15. https://www.nps.gov/grca/learn/news/season-close-north-rim.htm

Beginning in mid-February the National Park Service will rehabilitate the pump houses at Indian Garden and the Black Bridge near Phantom Ranch. https://www.nps.gov/grca/learn/news/pumphouse-and-black-bridge-repairs.htm

Each year in the spring (March – June) Grand Canyon National Park experiences an increase in turbidity in the drinking water. This increased turbidity is caused by snow melt and spring rains. https://www.nps.gov/grca/learn/news/annual-turbidity2017.htm

North Rim operations will begin seasonal shut-down of most visitor services on Sunday, October 15. https://www.nps.gov/grca/learn/news/north-rim-to-close.htm

The South Rim of Grand Canyon National Park has implemented Level 3 water restrictions following a series of breaks in the Transcanyon Waterline. https://www.nps.gov/grca/learn/news/level-3-restrictions.htm

North Rim operations in Grand Canyon National Park will begin day use operations on Thursday November 1, 2018. At that time, the Visitor Center, Backcountry Office and Campground Kiosk will be closed. The Entrance Station will be unstaffed, but fees will continue to be collected via an automated machine. Limited park staff is present on the North Rim year-round https://www.nps.gov/grca/learn/news/grand-canyon-north-rim-transitions-into-day-use-area-november-1-2018.htm

Each year in the spring (March - June) Grand Canyon National Park experiences an increase in turbidity in the drinking water. https://www.nps.gov/grca/learn/news/spring-snow-melt-causes-annual-turbidity.htm

Due to water turbidity and maintenance issues, some of the water filling stations and flush toilets normally available along the North Kaibab and Bright Angel Trails at this time of the year will not be open until water conditions change and/or water line repairs are made. https://www.nps.gov/grca/learn/news/backcountry-users-advised-of-changes-to-water-availability-on-north-kaibab-and-bright-angel-trails.htm

On Tuesday, June 4 and Wednesday, June 5 staff from the Division of Science and Resource Management (SRM) will be applying herbicide to the traffic islands on South Entrance and Yavapai Roads to remove grasses that attract elk in these congested areas of the Grand Canyon Village. The intent of the removal is to minimize conflicts between wildlife (elk) and both visitors and residents along the road corridors. https://www.nps.gov/grca/learn/news/south-entrance-and-yavapai-herbicide-use.htm

Grand Canyon National Park's North Rim will begin day use operations on Nov. 1, 2019. Visitors exploring the North Rim after Oct. 31 should plan to be self-sufficient, bringing enough food and water for their stay, as services will not be available. https://www.nps.gov/grca/learn/news/grand-canyon-n-r-to-begin-seasonal-day-use-operations.htm

North Carolina researchers are now trying to spread the word about their tried-and-true decontamination method for surgical masks.

The post Researchers Have Found a Way to Sterilize and Reuse Face Masks During Pandemic appeared first on Good News Network.

New York's Gov. Andrew Cuomo plans to pursue the treatment following its relative success in treating influenza and Ebola.

The post FDA Okays Historic Blood Treatment for COVID; Clinical Trials to Use Antibodies From Recovered Patients appeared first on Good News Network.

Kyoto University researchers said the vaccine for Alzheimer’s was effective and was also shown to have zero side effects observed in the mice.

The post New Alzheimer’s Nasal Spray Shown to Reduce Proteins Which Cause the Disease in Mice appeared first on Good News Network.

In addition to EV batteries being reused in 7-11 stores, their minerals can also provide many raw materials needed to run our world.

The post Old Electric Vehicle Batteries Can Be Recycled into New Sources of Energy—Even Used to Power 7-11 Stores appeared first on Good News Network.

The masks had been left in the warehouse of the Swedish store to gather dust following the most recent bird flu outbreak.

The post After Rediscovering Warehouse Treasure Trove of 50,000 Face Masks, IKEA Donates Them All to Hospital appeared first on Good News Network.

Kroger, which is the largest supermarket chain in the US by revenue, has now given their employees two different bonuses for their work during the pandemic.

The post Hourly Workers at Largest Grocery Chain in US Are All Getting ‘Hero Bonuses’ for Their Service Amid COVID-19 appeared first on Good News Network.

Tanner Howe, a singer-songwriter from Huntington Beach, hoped that his performances would brighten up isolating neighborhoods—and he was 100% correct.

The post Musician Uses Truck Bed to Play Drive-By Concerts for Friends in Quarantine – and the Video is Incredibly Heartwarming appeared first on Good News Network.

Roads are important ecological features of forest landscapes, but their cause-andeffect relationships with other ecosystem components are only recently becoming included in integrated landscape analyses. Simulation models can help us to understand how forested landscapes respond over time to disturbance and socioeconomic factors, and potentially to address the important role roads play in these processes.

We conducted an experimental study of infection, transmission, and persistence of a nucleopolyhedrovirus (NPV) of Douglas-fir tussock moth (Orgyia pseudotsugata) to better understand mechanisms determining the efficacy of the virus when it is used as a microbial control agent. In a field experiment, we quantified infection rates of larvae exposed to either Tussock Moth Biocontrol-1, the strain currently used for control by the U.S. Forest Service, or a wild-type strain isolated from a natural population. We first allowed each pathogen to decay on experimental branches for 0, 1, or 3 days before allowing uninfected larvae to feed on the branches, and then we fit both a generalized linear model and an epidemiological model of virus transmission to the infection data. Longer decay of the NPV resulted in lower infection rates, but evidence that overall virus transmission differed between wild and pesticide isolates of NPV was weak. The short persistence time of the virus suggests that it does not last long on foliage, in turn suggesting that application of TM Biocontrol-1 must be carefully timed to ensure maximum mortality.

Using CSS3 to produce a Carousel Slideshow. For Safari, Chrome, Opera and Safari v4 beta ONLY at the moment

Using CSS3 with perspective to animate carousel of slides with auto-run and slide enlarge. For Safari ONLY at the moment

Using CSS3 to produce a Carousel Slideshow. Animation for Safari, Chrome, Opera and Safari v4 beta ONLY at the moment. Now with a click action

A flyout list menu with top level links and a close menu icon for the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch.

A droplist menu with top level links and a close menu tab for the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch.

A pulldown panel containing a droplist menu using just CSS and suitable for the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch.

Using CSS3 to produce click gallery with permanent images to rival jQuery/javascript.

Vimeo video autopause and off screen pause/continue for all browsers including IE8+

A tutorial to replace the default controls on a Vimeo video with a Play / Pause button, and make responsive.

A CSS and javascript responsive swipe action gallery with momentum scrolling. For touch screen, trackpad and mouse.

This study updates an earlier assessment of the past, current, and prospective situation for the Nation's land base. We describe area changes among major land uses on the U.S. land base for historical trends from 1982 to 2002 and projections out to 2062.

Log moisture content has an important impact on many aspects of log home construction, including log processing, transportation costs, and dimensional stability in use. Air-drying times for house logs from freshly harvested trees can depend on numerous factors including initial moisture content, log diameter, bark condition, and environmental conditions during drying. In this study, we evaluated air-drying properties of young-growth Sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis (Bong.) Carr) and of western hemlock (Tsuga heterophylla (Raf.) Sarg.) from logs harvested in southeast Alaska.

Divi’s new scroll effects are made for you to easily take your web design experience to the next level. Of course, you can apply it to elements within your section directly, but you can choose to add motion to underlying elements too. Going for an underlying approach allows you to keep content static while having […]

The post How to Use Transformed Motion Shapes as Backgrounds with Divi appeared first on Elegant Themes Blog.

My Fuel Treatment Planner (MyFTP) is a tool for calculating and displaying the financial costs and potential revenues associated with forest fuel reduction treatments. It was designed for fuel treatment planners including those with little or no background in economics, forest management, or timber sales. This guide provides the information needed to acquire, load, and begin to use MyFTP.

Changing patterns of land use are at the heart of many environmental concerns regarding U.S. forest lands. Of all the human impacts to forests, development is one of the most significant because of the severity and permanency of the change.

An econometric model of private land-use decisions is used to project land use to 2030 for each county in the continental United States. On a national scale, forest area is projected to increase overall between 0.1 and 0.2 percent per year between now and 2030. However, forest area is projected to decrease in a majority of regions, including the key forestry regions of the South and the Pacific Northwest Westside. Urban area is projected to increase by 68 million acres, and cropland, pasture, rangeland, and Conservation Reserve Program land is projected to decline in area. Regional econometric models are needed to better represent region-specific economic relationships. County-level models of forest fragmentation indices are estimated for the Western United States. The core forest model is found to perform better than the model of like adjacencies for forest land. A spatially detailed analysis of forest fragmentation in Polk County, Oregon, reveals that forests become more fragmented even though forest area increases. By linking the land-use projection and forest fragmentation models, we project increases in the average county shares of core forest in 8 of the 11 Western States. The average like adjacency measure increases in six of the states. The aggregate and spatially detailed fragmentation methods are compared by projecting the fragmentation indices to 2022 for Polk County, Oregon. Considerable differences in the results were produced with the two methods, especially in the case of the like adjacency metric.

Public land managers are confronted with an ever-growing and diversifying set of demands for providing recreation opportunities. Coupled with a variety of trends (devolution of governance and decisionmaking, population growth, technological innovation, shifts in public values, economic restructuring) and reduced organizational capacity, these demands represent a significant and complex challenge to public land management. One way of dealing with this situation is to use a framework to assist in working through this complexity. A framework, for the purpose of this report, is a process using a set of steps, based on sound science, that assists managers in framing a particular problem, working through it, and arriving at a set of defendable decisions. Several such frameworks exist for providing recreation opportunities on public lands. These include the Recreation Opportunity Spectrum, Limits of Acceptable Change, Visitor Experience and Resource Protection, Visitor Impact Management, and Benefits-Based Management. The report traces the development of each of these frameworks, describes the fundamental premises and concepts used within them, and provides an assessment of the experience with their use. Each of the frameworks has been used with varying success, depending on the organization's will, its technical capacity, the extent to which the process is inclusive of varying value systems, how open and deliberative the process is, the extent to which the organization is concerned with effectiveness, and the extent to which issues are confronted at the systems level.

Estimates of national forest recreation use are available at the national, regional, and forest levels via the USDA Forest Service National Visitor Use Monitoring (NVUM) program. In some resource planning and management applications, analysts desire recreation use estimates for subforest areas within an individual national forest or for subforest areas that combine portions of several national forests. In this research note we have detailed two approaches whereby the NVUM sampling data may be used to estimate recreation use for a subforest area within a single national forest or for a subforest area combining portions of more than one national forest. The approaches differ in their data requirements, complexity, and assumptions. In the "new forest" approach, recreation use is estimated by using NVUM data obtained only from NVUM interview sites within the area of interest. In the "all-forest information" approach, recreation use is estimated by using sample data gathered on all portions of the national forest(s) that contain the area of interest.

Soil disturbance is a visually apparent result of using heavy equipment to harvest trees. Subsequent consequences for growth of remaining trees, however, are variable and seldom quantified. We measured tree growth 7 and 11 years after thinning of trees in four stands of coast Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii var. menziesii (Mirb. Franco)) where soil disturbance was limited by using planned skid trails, usually on dry soils. The three younger stands had responded to nitrogen fertilizer in the 4 years before thinning, but only one stand showed continued response in the subsequent 7- or 11-year period after thinning. The most consistent pattern observed was greater growth of residual trees located next to skid trails. The older stand also showed greater growth in trees located next to skid trails, whereas tillage of skid trails failed to benefit growth of nearby residual trees for the first 7 years after tillage. We conclude that traffic that compacted soil only on one side of residual trees did not reduce growth of nearby trees.

The USDA Forest Service implemented the National Visitor Use Monitoring (NVUM) program across the entire National Forest System (NFS) in calendar year 2000. The primary objective of the NVUM program is to develop reliable estimates of recreation use on NFS lands via a nationally consistent, statistically valid sampling approach. Secondary objectives of NVUM are to characterize recreation visits, collect data in support of regional economic analyses, and gauge national forest visitor satisfaction. We document and review the round 1 NVUM implementation in the USDA Forest Service Alaska Region (R-10) with examination of the R-10 prework, sample day implementation, survey completion rates, sampling at cabins, boat docks, and air carriers; and the NVUM expansion weights assigned to survey cases. Several opportunities to improve the implementation of the standard NVUM protocols in R-10 are identified.

The HCR (Harvest Cost-Revenue) Estimator is engineering and financial analysis software used to evaluate stand-level financial thresholds for harvesting smalldiameter ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa Dougl. ex Laws.) in the Southwest United States. The Windows-based program helps contractors and planners to identify costs associated with tree selection, residual handling, transportation of raw materials, and equipment used. Costs are compared against total financial return for regionally based market opportunities to arrive at potential net profit. Information is used to identify per-acre cost thresholds, for contract appraisal, and for prioritizing project planning for wildfire fuel reduction treatments and forest restoration efforts.

Aerial counts, in-person interviews, and mail-in questionnaires were used to survey sport fish use during the coho salmon (Oncorhynchus kisutch Walbaum) season on the Copper River Delta, Alaska from 2002 through 2006. Angler counts provided an index of use on individual streams and were used to develop a spatial database exhibiting patterns of use. In-person interviews and mail-in questionnaires were used to determine the effort, catch, and harvest of coho salmon by both local residents of Cordova and nonresident anglers.

This study considered three aspects of residential wood energy use in Alaska: current conditions and fuel consumption, knowledge and attitudes, and future use and conditions. We found that heating oil was the primary fuel for home heating in southeast and interior Alaska, whereas natural gas was used most often in south-central Alaska (Anchorage). Firewood heating played a much more important role as a secondary (vs. primary) heating source in all regions of Alaska. In interior Alaska, there was a somewhat greater interest in the use of wood energy compared to other regions. Likewise, consumption of fossil fuels was considerably greater in interior Alaska.

Sustaining farm and forest land has been an important goal in the United States because of the role these lands play in the livelihoods of rural residents while also providing desired open space benefits. However, land use policies to protect rural lands often involve a tension between balancing public interests regarding economic and open space goals with the private interests and property rights of farm and forest land owners.

This document introduces a computer software named SNAP for ArcGIS®, which has been developed to streamline scheduling and transportation planning for timber harvest areas. Using modern optimization techniques, it can be used to spatially schedule timber harvest with consideration of harvesting costs, multiple products, alternative destinations, and transportation systems. SNAP for ArcGIS attempts either to maximize a net present value or minimize discounted costs of harvesting and transportation over the planning horizon while meeting given harvest volume and acreage constraints. SNAP for ArcGIS works in the ArcGIS environment and provides an easy-to-use analytical tool for sophisticated spatial planning of timber harvest.

Scientists have had little information about how prescribed fire and cattle grazing—common practices in many Western ponderosa pine forests—affect plant abundance and reproduction in the forest understory. Pacific Northwest Research Station scientists began to explore how these practices affect vegetation in a five-year study of postfire vegetation in eastern Oregon ponderosa pine forests where cattle have been routinely pastured from late June or early July through early to mid August. For this area of eastern Oregon, they found that excluding cattle grazing during peak growing season increased native plant cover and grass flowering capability in ungrazed areas compared to grazed areas. Because vegetation was measured prior to releasing cattle on the land, the study's results tend to reflect lasting grazing impacts rather than simple consumption.

The economic linkages between national forests and surrounding communities have become increasingly important in recent years. One way national forests contribute to the economies of surrounding communities is by attracting recreation visitors who, as part of their trip, spend money in communities on the periphery of the national forest. We use survey data collected from visitors to all units in the National Forest System to estimate the average spending per trip of national forest recreation visitors engaged in various types of recreation trips and activities. Average spending of national forest visitors ranges from about $33 per party per trip for local residents on day trips to more than $983 per party per trip for visitors downhill skiing on national forest land and staying overnight in the local national forest area. We report key parameters to complete economic contribution analysis for individual national forests and for the entire National Forest System.